Joint inspections of services for older people

Along with Healthcare Improvement Scotland, we carry out joint inspections of health and social work services for older people. The Scottish Government expects NHS boards and local authorities to integrate health and social care services from April 2015. This policy aims to ensure the provision of seamless, consistent, efficient and high-quality services, which deliver very good outcomes for individuals and carers. Local partnerships have to produce a joint commissioning strategy. They are currently establishing shadow arrangements, and each partnership is producing a joint integration plan, including arrangements for older people’s services. We will scrutinise partnerships’ preparedness for health and social care integration.

It is planned that the scope of these joint inspections will be expanded to include health and social work services for other adults.

We worked with and Healthcare Improvement Scotland worked together to develop an inspection methodology, including a set of quality indicators to inspect against. We will use this methodology to determine how effectively health and social work services work in partnership to deliver very good outcomes for older people and their carers. The inspections will also look at the role of the independent sector and the third sector to deliver positive outcomes for older people and their carers.

The inspection teams are made up of inspectors and associate inspectors from both the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland and clinical advisers seconded from NHS boards. We will have ‘lay’ inspectors who are carers and also Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s public partners on each of our inspections. The inspections are comprehensive and each one takes around 24 weeks to complete. We will inspect six partnerships each year.

All of our inspection reports are available to download in the publications and statitics area of this website.